3 ms·

Is the GPL "standard" for Haskell programs?

by sigzero 16y ago

dons 16y ago
No, the majority (around 80% of Haskell programs) use the BSD3 license.
- sigzero 16y ago
  Thanks, I was just curious. I am not for or against either license but since that how-to referenced the GPL I was curious enough to ask the question.
- pjscott 16y ago
  I wonder how much this has to do with BSD3 being the default license when you use the "cabal init" command to generate a project skeleton. Most people probably don't care which open source license they're using; of those who do care, it's generally GPL versus everything else.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    I don't think it has much to do with "cabal init". I've used Haskell and noticed that most libraries are BSD3, so I make my libraries BSD3 also. I did not know that there was such a thing as "cabal init" until just now :) Over in the Perl world, most libraries are GPL2/Artistic, so I follow that convention. In the end, I would probably prefer the MIT license for libraries... but following convention seems better than setting my own. (For applications, I go with the GPL3 because it's not going to inconvenience anyone and it provides the best protection of free software. But people are just going to skip your library if they have to relicense their project, so I find that the GPL is not particularly appropriate in that case.)
  - ionfish 16y ago
    For me it's a conscious choice. On general principle, I think that open-sourced library code at least should almost always be BSD-licensed. Furthermore, there are many good libraries on Hackage which I might well want to use in a commercial product some day, and a BSD license will make that easy, no matter where my code ends up running. Releasing my own code under the BSD license is therefore also a small gesture towards maintaining this state of affairs.
ionfish 16y ago
Your question intrigued me, so I ran a quick script against the current Hackage database (the list of packages you download from Hackage when you run `cabal update`). Here are my results: BSD3: 2159 (72.38%) GPL: 345 (11.57%) LGPL: 117 (3.92%) OtherLicense: 107 (3.59%) PublicDomain: 85 (2.85%) MIT: 67 (2.25%) GPL-3: 64 (2.15%) LGPL-2.1: 16 (0.54%) GPL-2: 12 (0.4%) LGPL-3: 8 (0.27%) BSD4: 3 (0.1%) Two libraries didn't list their license in their .cabal file. One of these is (from looking at their license file) available under a simple permissive license; the other doesn't make it clear.
- sigzero 16y ago
  Was it a Haskell script? :-)
  - ionfish 16y ago
    https://gist.github.com/943054 https://gist.github.com/943054 I've tidied it up and added some comments explaining what it does. The only dependency outside libraries which come with GHC is the 'text' package, which is included in the Haskell Platform.

Is the GPL "standard" for Haskell programs?

by sigzero 16y ago

Is the GPL "standard" for Haskell programs?

dons 16y ago

No, the majority (around 80% of Haskell programs) use the BSD3 license.

sigzero 16y ago
Thanks, I was just curious. I am not for or against either license but since that how-to referenced the GPL I was curious enough to ask the question.
pjscott 16y ago
I wonder how much this has to do with BSD3 being the default license when you use the "cabal init" command to generate a project skeleton. Most people probably don't care which open source license they're using; of those who do care, it's generally GPL versus everything else.
- jrockway 16y ago
  I don't think it has much to do with "cabal init". I've used Haskell and noticed that most libraries are BSD3, so I make my libraries BSD3 also. I did not know that there was such a thing as "cabal init" until just now :) Over in the Perl world, most libraries are GPL2/Artistic, so I follow that convention. In the end, I would probably prefer the MIT license for libraries... but following convention seems better than setting my own. (For applications, I go with the GPL3 because it's not going to inconvenience anyone and it provides the best protection of free software. But people are just going to skip your library if they have to relicense their project, so I find that the GPL is not particularly appropriate in that case.)
- ionfish 16y ago
  For me it's a conscious choice. On general principle, I think that open-sourced library code at least should almost always be BSD-licensed. Furthermore, there are many good libraries on Hackage which I might well want to use in a commercial product some day, and a BSD license will make that easy, no matter where my code ends up running. Releasing my own code under the BSD license is therefore also a small gesture towards maintaining this state of affairs.

ionfish 16y ago

Your question intrigued me, so I ran a quick script against the current Hackage database (the list of packages you download from Hackage when you run `cabal update`). Here are my results: BSD3: 2159 (72.38%) GPL: 345 (11.57%) LGPL: 117 (3.92%) OtherLicense: 107 (3.59%) PublicDomain: 85 (2.85%) MIT: 67 (2.25%) GPL-3: 64 (2.15%) LGPL-2.1: 16 (0.54%) GPL-2: 12 (0.4%) LGPL-3: 8 (0.27%) BSD4: 3 (0.1%) Two libraries didn't list their license in their .cabal file. One of these is (from looking at their license file) available under a simple permissive license; the other doesn't make it clear.

sigzero 16y ago
Was it a Haskell script? :-)
- ionfish 16y ago
  https://gist.github.com/943054 https://gist.github.com/943054 I've tidied it up and added some comments explaining what it does. The only dependency outside libraries which come with GHC is the 'text' package, which is included in the Haskell Platform.